


You Can Leave Your Hat On (1988 A.C.)

by orphan_account



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Friends to Lovers, Millinery, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Totally over the top
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 04:36:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16298294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Her newest derby appears around the landing.





	You Can Leave Your Hat On (1988 A.C.)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ikkiM](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ikkiM/gifts).



> The prompt came from ikkiM. Dedicated to her and the other magnificent, inspiring ladies at JBO. At the time, we were writing fics that referenced the Seven.
> 
> Most people know the Joe Cocker cover of the song from the movie 9 1/2 Weeks, so here I link to the fun Etta James version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSmdT1Si4bo. The lyrics are actually rather apt for J/B, unless you take them in the creepy way some people think writer Randy Newman intended them. I choose not to! Nope! 
> 
> (Also, the ham-handed design details I've written in this are deliberate, because I and some of the other JBO ladies enjoy that sort of thing! They're just Easter eggs; nothing important.)

As she walks home from the Underground station, Brienne rolls her shoulders, cracks her neck, and thanks the Seven that her atelier has, once again, crafted the finest Melee hats of the year. Other milliners might be showier, but any hat bearing her label shows exacting craftsmanship, sculptural architecture, and exquisite materials.

This year, at her best friend’s urging, and guided by her own keen assessment of the market, she and her apprentice Podrick had also produced a very fine, and even slightly innovative, Derby model for the gentlemen’s line. Said best friend and housemate, himself a sought-after interior designer, had tried the prototype—7⅜, 2-inch rolled brim, 4½-inch crown, silk-lined, butter-soft calfskin sweatband, espresso-dark felted wool, matching 12-ligne grosgrain band with one sly little Blue tit feather—and declared it “sufficient.”

At 2:00 a.m., with Melee weekend mere days away, well satisfied that all her clients would be admirably turned out, she stumbles into their softly lit loft and pulls off her Dornish-red cashmere beret.

Music suddenly blares.

What?

_Baby, take off your coat…reaaallll slow…_

What the hells? she thinks, as she is already shrugging off her navy-blue gabardine swing coat and hanging it on its peg.

_And take off your shoes…_

Well, he would know her entry routine, after all these years.

She toes off her wine-velvet smoking loafers and begins to turn the shade she just shed. What in all of Westeros…?

_Baby take off your dress…_

“YOU FIRST,” she hollers up the stairs at her best friend, whom she desperately loves and lately suspects might maybe possibly almost certainly love her back, though the Maiden knows this rather saucy shout just then is as far as she will go. For now.

_Yes yes yes_

And then her world tilts on its axis.

_You can leave your hat on_

Her newest derby appears around the landing.

 

*****

 

Ye gods.

His arm—his glorious, golden-tanned left arm, with its various cords of muscle that make her knees go weak even when he is just tossing some Weetabix into a bowl—shoots up above the eye-high wall encasing the stairs and landing.

_Go on over there_

His hand—his one, perfect, elegant, long-fingered hand, with the nail beds square and perfectly set, with just enough hair on the back to make her eyes cross at its utter masculinity, especially when he placed it over hers to keep her from stabbing an unpleasant client of his at an ill-conceived dinner last year—emphatically points toward their tobacco-leather-clad Chesterfield sofa.

_Turn on the light_

She twists the knob on the antique black tole table lamp and stills.

His left foot—his oddly unscathed by age or sport foot, with tendons and veins Michelangelo himself could not have improved upon, with its neatly graduated set of toes, the foot that with its mate makes her womb throb whenever he kicks the pair into her lap on movie night—appears around the edge of the wall.

_That’s right_

She can barely hear the music over the static in her ears.

Then his sculpted calf, his furred shin, then—oh, Mother!—his knee. How it is that just his patella makes her heart pound? Last week he whacked it against the marble vanity top in her bathroom while hanging a new mirror he’d found at a tag sale. He made her come in and kiss it better and she had to go lie down after.

_You give me a reason to live_

She is dead. Surely the Stranger met her as she was murdered in some incident on the Tube on the way home tonight. Or perhaps she is simply dreaming at and drooling on her worktable back in the Carnaby district.

His thigh appears, that hollow along the one tendon as distracting as ever.

The derby suddenly disappears.

_You give me a reason to live_

O, Crone help her!—there he stands at the foot of the stairs, derby brim held in his left hand, his right wrist gentle against the crown so as not to crush it, over the part of him she has only ever imagined. Nightly. For years.

From the derby her eyes travel up the arrow of darker old-gold hair to his navel, across abs no 45-year-old man should have (someone send a note to his personal trainer), over white-gold-pelted pecs with—what, pebbled nipples? (oh, there go hers)—past his silver-and-brass-bearded chin—Warrior, no, he is not biting his bottom lip!—to his eyes, drawn to enter those forests by his characteristic inexorable will.

He steps closer.

_You give me a reason to live_

Another step. Their gaze does not waver.

_You give me a reason to live_

Another step. She finds she is now standing. She finds she is not breathing.

_Sweet darling_

He smiles. Has she ever seen this particular smile before? So sure, so…true. 

Yes, she has.

_You can leave your hat on_

He smirks. He cocks an eyebrow. She hears the soft thud as the derby falls to the Aubusson carpet. The ridiculously expensive one he just had to have two years ago because it holds the same blue as her eyes, he’d said.

_Feeling_

He takes her hands in his and raises them to his heart, which pulses erratically against her battered milliner’s knuckles.

 _They don't believe_  
_In this love of mine_  
_They don't know I love you_

Their locked eyes shimmer. A sound she has never made before escapes her throat.

_They don't know what love is_

His face, his beloved face, comes to hers.

_They don't know what love is_

Their foreheads touch. His aquiline nose slides along her misshapen one.

_They don't know what love is_

They breathe as one.

_I know what love is_

_Sweet darling_

Their mouths are together and then, then, the Smith be thanked, finally then, their souls are truly forged as they kiss each other deeply with all the love they’ve foolishly held back for so long.

 

*****

 

Her cerulean silk blouse, his gift to her on her last nameday, is draped over the arm of the Chesterfield.

Her gray wool trousers are strewn at the edge of the carpet.

Her simple lilac bra festoons the lampshade. Well done, Margaery, for talking her into that purchase.

The Seven only know where the matching knickers ended up.

The derby, though, is on her head. Her adorable, beloved head. His best friend’s—now his incredible lover’s—head. A few strands of her straw-blonde hair have escaped being tucked under the hat to fall at the side of her face and at her nape.

She is sitting cross-legged on the bed—whose bed they ended up in, he is not certain—amid tangled Bellino linens—oh, his bed, then—gloriously naked and spooning gelato he has just brought up to her from their well-appointed galley kitchen.

He has finally met, and kissed, each of those cheery freckles on her serious creamy shoulders. Finally, he has savored the dusky-pink nipples atop those neat breasts meant for his palm alone.

At last, he has put his tongue to the backs of those knees from which her endless thighs and calves (someone send a note to her kickboxing trainer) extend.

And her ass—Father help him—was even finer than he thought possible. And he had given it a lot of thought. Hourly. For years.

Jaime notices her frank appraisal and preens a bit, shifting his hips to ensure she gets the best view of his thick cock as it stands and salutes the perfection of her ass.

He smirks at her sharp inhale.

“Well, you see, Brim,” he says as he takes the carton from her strong, fascinatingly worn hands, joins her on the bed, and answers the question she had posed as he padded back downstairs, “Desperate times called for desperate measures.”

He braces the soggy container between his feet, scoops out a spoonful, and savors it, too.

“D-des-per-ate what now?” She is his favorite shade of red. And now he gets to see where exactly that darling flush spreads.

“I had a vision, Brim,” he asserts, brandishing the antique teaspoon. “I then suggested you add derby hats to your line. You, perforce, brought that derby home to me, and all I’ve been able to think about since, as well as before, is getting you in it, naked as you are now. The brilliantly planned, if I do say so myself, knee-whacking incident last week didn’t manage to achieve that purpose,” he chuckles at her scowl, “So I had to go all in—or out, as it were.”


End file.
